Samsung and Microsoft work to speed up SSDs

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A few weeks ago SanDisk slated Windows Vista for not being optimized for SSD (Solid State Drive) storage hardware.

"As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid-state disk”. Said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari

SandDisk’s solution is to develop a new controller technology which will overcome these limitations but could take upto a year to reach the market.

Now according to PCworld Samsung has been in talks with Microsoft to increase the performance of SSDs using Vista and other MS OSes.

The speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are different than hard drives, said Michael Wang, flash marketing manager at Sun.

Standard magnetic hard drives have a 512kb cluster size where as SSDs only have a 4kb cluster size. Samsung hopes to work with Microsoft to boost SSD performance on Windows by discovering optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.

SSDs have been hailed as the future storage medium for PC’s and internet connected devices, citing speed, power use and durability.

#1 +warwagon on 07 Aug 2008 - 15:39

SSD is an awesome Technology. I'd love to have one once they mature.

(1 reply) #2 GP007 on 07 Aug 2008 - 16:02

Read speeds are fine, it's the write speeds with smaller files that seem to slowdown SSD's from what I remember.

But that's just because everything is written for HDDs and they haven't yet worked out the I/O controllers for SSDs just right.

I suppose MS working on NTFS to better write to SSDs is one of the ways also, but I always figured (like Sandisk says) newer/updated controllers would work out the performance issues.

#2.1 markjensen on 07 Aug 2008 - 18:40

I'd have to look it up again to be certain, but it seems that SSDs were better on random reads, since there is no seek time. But far worse on sequential reads, probably because of block size? But a hard drive blazes on sequential data because it is able to just spin and stream the data, whereas a SSD is addressed to each block in turn.

(2 replies) #3 tsupersonic on 07 Aug 2008 - 20:58

Where are the hybrid hard drives that hard drive manufacturers were touting before Vista's release? They said Vista was supposed to take "advantage" of these hybrid HDD's and SSD's...

#3.1 Burst404 on 07 Aug 2008 - 23:20

Yea! WTH?!

#3.2 neufuse on 08 Aug 2008 - 00:24

(tsupersonic said @ #3)

They are out, just mostly in notebook form factor 2.5" drives

#4 JaLooNz on 08 Aug 2008 - 06:27

Sand-disk?

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